During a ceremony March 19 at Dixie State College in St. George, Utah, Stephen D. Nadauld was inaugurated as the 17th president in the institution's 99-year history.
In March 2008, Dixie State installed President Nadauld, a member of the Second Quorum of the Seventy from 1991-96, as its interim president following the unexpected resignation of the previous president. Despite the "interim" tag, President Nadauld helped grow enrollment by 40 percent over the last two years, in addition to securing several million dollars of funding from the state Legislature for a new commons building despite tough economic times and budgetary cutbacks.
President Nadauld, 67, credits his prior tenure as president of Weber State University from 1985-90 for the institutional acumen that allowed him to hit the ground running in 2008.
"One of the most satisfying aspects of this whole experience is the fact that the things I learned at Weber, I could use to be helpful (at Dixie State)," he said. "When you go to Weber and you learn about how higher education budgets work, then you don't have to spend 18 months learning that at Dixie. You sort of remember that the second week on the job. …
"At Weber, we wanted to grow the student body, and so we did some aggressive recruiting. That's the first thing I did on the second day or the third day on the job at Dixie. We put in place some recruiting goals and some guidelines and have been able to broaden and increase our student body and recruit minority students."
Master adapters
President Nadauld and his wife, Margaret, have donned many prominent hats in the course of their Church service. After he completed his tenure as a General Authority in 1996, she was called to be Young Women general president from 1997-2002. Then following her release from that capacity, he was called to be president of the Switzerland Geneva Mission for a three-year period commencing in 2003.
With such significant changes already in their rearview mirror, the transition from Provo — where he worked as a professor of finance in BYU's Marriott School of Management immediately prior to the Dixie State appointment — to St. George in 2008 proved relatively seamless for President and Sister Nadauld.
"I've had many different kinds of experiences," he said. "Each change of assignment has had a break-in period and then an adjustment as the assignment comes to an end. Each of these changes has left us loving those with whom we've worked and being grateful for our newfound friends and associates. Sister Nadauld and I have helped each other through the many changes in circumstances that we've experienced. In each case, we've been very grateful for our opportunities to serve. We've always been delighted to see what the next interesting experience might be."
Included in President Nadauld's list of goals that he wants to accomplish at Dixie State is adding 20 to 22 new degree programs over the next three to five years and finishing construction on the forthcoming Holland Commons Building in time for fall semester of 2012. Ultimately, he envisions Dixie State becoming a regional state university.
Elevated perspective
One product of serving as a Seventy that President Nadauld deems vitally applicable to his current duties at Dixie State is the insight he acquired into how higher education enriches the lives of students. Indeed, while traveling to stakes as a General Authority in the early '90s, he seemed to always be running into students he taught during professorial stints at the University of Utah (1970-72); the University of California, Berkeley (1973-76); and BYU (1976-83).
"In every one of those stakes, I had a former student, sometimes a half-dozen or more former students, come up to me," he recalled. "They would tell me they were the vice president in a corporation or they were the PTA president or they were the Scoutmaster or they were the bishop or the Relief Society president or whatever they were doing.
"It was an interesting experience because when you're teaching these young people, as I had done in the early years of my teaching career, you think they're going to amount to something, but you don't have any evidence. And then as you go out 15 years later and you travel all through these various parts of the country and other countries and you see them and see what they've become and what contribution they're making, it just really gives you a dramatic piece of data, a piece of evidence that what we're doing for young people does make a difference. The things that we're teaching them help them become leaders in their communities and in their businesses."
President and Sister Nadauld have seven married sons and 25 grandchildren. Four of the sons live along Utah's Wasatch Front, two reside in California and the seventh calls Oregon home.
